Alaska Solitaire

Twenty-one still hidden

How to play Alaska Solitaire

The whole deck is dealt to the table. Column one holds a single card; the other six hold a run of face-down cards topped by five face-up ones, with one more hidden card in each column as you move right. Twenty-one cards start concealed, and there is no stock of any kind.

The move rule comes straight from Yukon: pick up any face-up card and everything stacked above it travels with it, however jumbled. Only the card you selected has to land legally.

What is different is where it can land. Alaska builds by exact suit, like Russian, but in either direction — the 7 of hearts will accept the 6 of hearts or the 8 of hearts. There is no wrapping, so an ace never sits on a king.

Runs that climb and fall

Moves that run in both directions

Using both directions

Alaska Solitaire strategy

Pick a direction per column and stay with it. Mixing up and down inside one column is legal move by move and produces a pile that needs two exact cards to continue instead of one. Decide early whether a column is climbing or descending.

Build downward when you have the choice. A descending run ends on a low card, and low cards are the ones you want to send to foundations anyway. An ascending run ends on a high card that has nowhere useful to go.

Dig the right-hand columns first, as in the rest of the family. Column seven hides six cards and column one hides none, so that is where the deal is decided and where you have the most spare material to work with early on.

Send aces and twos up promptly. With suit-strict packing they are close to useless in the tableau, and the foundations are the only place cards can leave the board.

What the extra freedom costs

How an Alaska deal runs out of room

Building a run that points the wrong way

Because you can go up or down, it is easy to assemble a sequence that climbs when everything around it descends. A 7-8-9 of hearts is a legal, tidy pile that accepts only a 10 — and if the 10 of hearts is buried, that column is finished. Decide which direction a column is going before you commit to it.

Treating the extra direction as extra freedom

Two destinations per card sounds like Yukon's two, and in raw count it is. But Yukon's two are different cards of the same rank, while Alaska's are different ranks of the same suit — so the cards that help you are far more specific, and a suit whose middle ranks are all buried gives you nothing at all.

Opening a column with the kings unreachable

A space still needs a king, and there is no stock to produce one. Alaska's bidirectional rule makes clearing a column look easier than it is; check that a king is actually loose before you spend the moves.

Alaska's real odds

Is Alaska Solitaire winnable?

More often than Russian, less often than Yukon — which is exactly where you would expect it to sit. The bidirectional rule genuinely helps: positions that would be locked in Russian frequently have one move available here, and one move is often enough to restart a stalled board.

It does not help as much as the destination count suggests, because the two destinations are ranks rather than colours and are therefore much more specific. We do not publish a figure: some Alaska versions allow any card into an empty column, and that changes the answer more than the direction rule does.

Up or down, no wrap

Where Alaska sits in the packet games

All four move cards identically. The only column that ever differs is what the lead card is allowed to land on — and that is enough to make them feel like separate games.

If Alaska appeals but you want the difficulty back, Russian is the same game with the upward direction removed. If you want it easier, Yukon's colour packing is far more forgiving than either.